Black Hats In Spring

So I have a pretty insanely busy April ahead of me. So busy that I have now decided to name the next few weeks as The Official 2013 E-merl Spring Tour. Wooo! The centrepiece of the tour will be my new hypercomic installation called Black Hats In Hell that will be opening at two – count ’em, two! – different locations this month. On the 15th April I will be taking over the Postgraduate Gallery at the University Of Hertfordshire with the initial installation of the comic, which has been designed specifically to make use of unique shape of the gallery space.

Then on the 19th of April I will be installing a new, site-specific remix of the comic outside the Platform Theatre at Central St Martins in London. This second version will incorporate collaborative digressions made by some of the students at CSM and features as part of the Comica festival taking place that weekend. I’ll be there in person on Saturday the 20th April as part of the Comica Comiket and would love to hear attendees feedback about the work.

But my travels in April do not stop there! I’m also hitting the conference circuit and will be delivering two papers across three conferences without the aid of a safety net or, probably, any reasonable amount of sleep. The hijinks begin on April 3rd when I’ll be delivering a paper entitled “Comics Are Control” as part of the Adventures In Textuality conference at the University Of Sunderland. Then a week later on April 10th I’ll be at the opposite end of the country at the University of Sussex delivering a paper on Game Comics as part of their Tablet Syposium.

For the Spring Tour’s grand finale I’ll be popping across to Germany from April 23rd to 26th in order to deliver an expanded version of my Game Comics paper at the Change & Continuity Symposium as part of the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film. If any of you are in any of those places at the same time I am in those places you should probably say “hi.” And then you should probably buy me a drink because, if I have actually managed to succeed in meeting all those deadlines, then I am certainly going to be in need of one.